Artist/Name/Legal Name

Legal Name of a Person

A Legal Name is the name of a person as used in official dealings, especially with governments. Many musicians are known by an alias, and we refer to that as the PerformanceName.

For MusicBrainz purposes, if an artist works under their PerformanceName, the Legal Name is primarily used to hold biographical details, such as personal relationships.

The birth certificate is the usual place you will find a legal name. However, legal names can be changed at any time (eg by marriage, deed poll etc).

Examples

• Declan Patrick MacManus is the Legal Name of Elvis Costello. Paul David Hewson is the Legal Name of Bono.

Issues

• There is some discussions about whether to duplicate the artist birth date and artist death date in both PerformanceNames and LegalNames (see DateOfBirthStyle).
• It's not clear what we should do when an artist has more than one legal name - that is, how should they be related together, and how should they relate to performance names. One proposal is at LinkingDifferentArtistNames.

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